Monday, December 28, 2009

An increase in value of hit and expertise; the trend for threat to be important continues as DPS scales faster than bear threat does. In addition, hit and expertise remain fairly rare in other pieces of gear.

A value on armor pen. Not a big one, mind you, but it's slightly less than haste.

A much lower value on armor on the weapon; this is almost entirely to discount doing things like using Origin of Nightmares any longer.

A higher value of feral AP and strength. Again, mostly for threat.

The same value of agility and stamina as posted before. Agility remains one of the strongest stats for a bear - even with icecrown nerfs - and you can't easily discount it.

Not surprisingly, the big winner for weapons for bears is Bloodfall, which has a ton of stamina and agility (at least compared to Distant Land) and is overall just awesome. The heroic version is even more amazing. I would also caution you to not entirely overlook Cryptmaker; this oddly-itemized mace isn't all that desirable for most DPS specs (they'd rather go with shadow's edge or bryntroll) and it's very likely that the only other spec that would want it is a DK tank. It's not as good as Bloodfall due to the loss of agility; missing 5% dodge before DR and almost 400 armor is nothing to shake a stick at by itself. But it does have a ton of stamina, will be a very good threat weapon and may be an easy thing to grab.

Karalynn - it is really awesome. All credit goes to Cruce of Eternal on Scarlet Crusade.

Alyson - yeah, I get that a lot too.

Copey - I miss not wanting to use Origin on everything. But I also like having to think about threat a bit more.

Jam - Relentless Gladiator is fairly high up there - but the stamina just doesn't outweigh the extra damage, especially as it stands. It might be that heroic mobs hit like Gormok all over again, but from the PTR that's not what we saw. That might change, but I doubt it. And the stamina different between relentless and Distant Land isn't so huge. Come S8, we'll see what it looks like.

Sixx - hah! Yeah, guildies are doing that when we get the buff going up to the Gunship. "OMG, what's your HP?"

Alyson - double hah.

Haedus - the reason Feral AP is rated slightly higher is because of Predatory Strikes, which for a long time worked only on the Feral AP. I believe it still does, but I haven't checked recently.

Hi Kalon,Thank you for another great post. However, I think you put to much weight on threat. On the first 4 bosses in Icecrown threat is not an issue, since the tank taunt the boss off each other.

I would like to know how good/bad Origin of Nightmares is if you do not artificially lower the weight of armor? Or put another way, if you are only interested in avoidance, mitteragtion and effective healt (stamina/armor!!) how high would Origin of Nightmare be?

This is not a mute question as we can change weapon during the fight and therefore start off with a high threat weapon and the switch to a high avoidance/mittergation weapon during a phase where mittigation is highly valuable.

I'm pretty sure it Predatory Strikes affects Feral AP, because I recall noticing my attack power increase by about 500 (give or take) when I upgraded from Anguish to Twin's Pact.

Yea right now until I see huge damage spikes, I'm starting to invest a little bit of gemming back into agility, and not stacking double stam trinkets as much. My experience with the first 4 fights is that damage output even from tanks matters (and pulling over 4500 dps on Saurfang zerging/cleaving the adds is hella fun).

Threat is a funny thing. What was great just a couple weeks ago (Regular Twins Pact) is now showing it’s age and I can’t wait to upgrade to a higher threat weapon. I normally way out gear my dps counterparts in raids and heroics. Even with this being the case, they are having to throttle back on dps so as not to pass me. I’m doing everything possible, and they are on my ass, and only there because they are good raiders and are doing exactly their job.

Obviously it would be boring as hell for dps if threat was never an issue. That’s the whole point of being a super good dps, pushing the limits of threat while maximizing damage, while not causing a raid wipe. To work as a team though a tank must continuously increase his threat potential so that the dps can continuously increase their damage potential. Once harder bosses are released there is no way enrage timers could be met if dps had to throttle back really hard, as they would in a case such as with Origin. Plus, though it may not be nearly as much as the dps, tanks still do damage and if you wipe at 1% and were doing poor damage as a tank it kind of makes you wonder what an extra 500 dps over the course of the fight would have done for you.

As far as heroics, I was tanking for one of our main healers on his hunter alt, and he was pulling off me left and right, probably on purpose. It was all fun and games for us, but this is one of the things that makes the random pugs so hard to deal with as a tank. Non raiders decked out in 232 T9 gear can pull threat off me, and I’m full 245.

I look at it this way: as long as there are fights where you are the only tank, and it's your job to maintain threat - and if that is difficult - then threat is important.

Though it's an interesting idea to swap weapons for added mitigation.

Xarnen - it's more a question of whether you get more of a bonus from Feral AP than you do the AP on a staff. It's not clear whether or not that's the case. Another thing for me to test in my copious amounts of spare time :p

Hey thanks for this, I got a little insight into what I should shoot for as a go through ICC. We're only doing normal modes (heroic modes are way off for us) so I have to edit my goals a little to match.

One thing I noticed is that I am just absolutely swimming in expertise and hit as it is. I've been trying to shed gear just to get down to the cap for both. So unless I get an entire new set of gear, all these expertise/hit weights are way skewed out of my favor. However, you were nice enough to make a link to the items so I can quickly scan through and find the ones with less hit and expertise.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.